The first time I had to document my educational practice in the classroom… I was not sure about how to start, I knew that in Reggio Emilia they documented and nothing else, so I attended a couple of trainings and started to investigate.

We could define the documentation in an easy way as the collection and exposition of the educational processes. It is an instrument that allows us to think about our educational practice while making visible the work in our classroom.

From this definition, several questions may arise: What can I document? Which tools do I have to do it? How do I document it?

What can I document?

Well, you can document absolutely everything that happens in the classroom: proposals for experimentation, daily activities such as lunch time, conversations and comments that we listen between students or studdent and teachers, drawings or artistic productions carried out by our students.

To document any of these moments it is necessary to observe and listen to our students. In this case, when we say listening to our students, we refer to being heedful with the five senses to what happens in our classroom, to the needs of each student, to their interests, to their evolutionary processes.

When making a documentation that we will present to the families or to the educational community, we must be careful to choose the moments that best represent what we want to show.

What do I need to document?

To carry out the documentation we have different means; we can use something as simple as a pen and paper to register a comment or conversation, take pictures of specific moments or record an audio or a video of the conversation or the moment we want to document; this will depend on the resources we have at our disposal.

It is also advisable to prepare a registration sheet where you can fill different fields: educators in that space and their roles, the activity I want to document and why, how the children react to the game proposal, if the objectives were apropiated or not,which tools were used to document.

How do I document?

When making our documentation we can use different formats, choosing which one is a task of each teacher.

If we only want to show a text, a transcription of a comment heard in the classroom, we should look for the right position to place it and thus attract the attention of the people we want to show it to. As well as taking care of the format and, of course, the spelling.

If we want to show a photograph, or a sequence of several pictures, we must think about the most appropriate composition and complete them with a careful and quality text; the text that goes with the photos may be a transcription of what was said at that moment, an explanation of what happened from the point of view of the adult or a kid, or a quote from some author that represents what the pictures show. The photographs can be assembled in different simpler or more complicated ways: we can make a mural and stick it on the wall, a totem that grows from the ground, hang a composition from the ceiling, stick it on the floor… you just have to think about where you want to place it and let your imagination fly.

And if we are thinking abour showing a video we shoud look for the best place to locate the projector or TV and find a pace with the right lighting conditions. Moreover, we have to repare the assembly of the images with a suitable text and audio, etc.

Two books that can help you and serve as a guide are: Documentar la vida de los niños y las niñas en la escuela, which will help you to delve a little deeper into the subject of documentation; and Documentar, una nueva mirada in which you will find examples of photographs and texts that can accompany them. Both books are interesting to work on the subject of documentation in the classroom in a simple way.